- Address: Avenida Saavedra, La Paz
- Country: Bolivia
- Capacity: 41,000
- Opened: 1930
- Main use: Football
- Tenants: Bolívar (football), The Strongest (football)
Extra stadium info – Estadio Hernando Siles
The stadium, which is also used for athletics and concerts, opened with a football match. Club The Strongest won the game. In 1997, the Estadio Hernando Siles hosted its first-ever final of the Copa América. The national football team of Brazil won the tournament after defeating Bolivia. Luis Arturo Hernández Carreón from the United Mexican States became the record goalscorer of the 1997 Copa América.
Tenants
The football clubs named Club Bolívar and Club The Strongest use the venue for home games. They became two of the first Bolivian sports clubs with 100,000 followers on their main social media page. The Strongest was founded in 1908 and Club Bolívar was founded in 1925. Club Bolívar and The Strongest won the Bolivian top-flight football league various times. Both clubs played numerous matches in the Copa Libertadores, the South American football championship for clubs.
The national football team of Bolivia
In 2009, the stadium hosted a football match with 30,000 people in attendance. The game was between Bolivia and the Argentine Republic, a football powerhouse. Bolivia defeated the visitors 6-1, inflicting the worst defeat for the Argentines in 60 years. In 1930, the national football team of Bolivia played in the inaugural FIFA World Cup. They lost their first 1930 FIFA World Cup game against Yugoslavia. Bolivia also lost their second 1930 FIFA World Cup game, in which they faced Brazil.
The high altitude
In 2007, the Estadio Hernando Siles was banned by FIFA for a few weeks, after protests that the high altitude gave the national football team of Bolivia an unfair advantage against opponents who had only a few days to acclimatise before playing. In 2017, the world-famous Brazilian football star Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior posted pictures of Brazilian football players with oxygen masks before a FIFA World Cup qualifier at the Estadio Hernando Siles. Neymar commented that it is inhumane to play under those conditions.
